28 February 2015

There’s
an old story that claims the word handicap
derives from wounded soldiers returning home from war with injuries preventing them from returning to their day jobs, and leaving them with no option
other than to beg on the streets, their caps literally held in their hands to catch
the pennies of passers-by.

Nothing says wealth and sophistication better than a puffball skirt

As
ingenious a story as this is, it is of course completely untrue. (Not least
because this would have likely given us the word “capihand” rather than handicap.) In fact the true origin of the word lies in an old method of
trading goods called “hand-in-cap”, the origins of which date back as far as the fourteenth century at least.

Imagine there are two traders who want to exchange goods, but who are unsure
about the relative value of the items they’re looking to swap. In a
“hand-in-cap” trade, they would turn to a third party—essentially, a kind of
umpire—who would take a look at the items up for exchange and assess their value.
If he thought there were any kind of discrepancy between the two, he’d come up with a price (called the “odds”, or the “boot”) that the owner
of the cheaper lot would then have to add into the exchange to make it fair.

Next, out comes the cap. The umpire, having given his assessment of the exchange, would
then hold out his upturned cap. Both of the traders would take a few loose
coins from their pockets, and go to drop them in it. If they agreed to the
exchange, they’d drop their money into the cap, but
if they didn’t, they’d keep it in their hands.

If
both traders agreed, the exchange would go ahead as planned and the umpire
would get to keep whatever change had been thrown in the cap as his fee. If
neither of the traders agreed, the umpire would get nothing. And if only one agreed, he would get to retrieve his cash from the cap, the umpire would still get nothing, and no trade would go ahead.

Whatever the outcome, the umpire was always incentivised to come up with as fair exchange as possible, and the trade would only go ahead once everyone was happy.

So
how does an obscure mediaeval trading system lead us to the word handicap as we have it today? Well, it
was the idea of assessing the worth of something, just as the umpire did, that
led to the idea of “handicap” horse races, in which an adjudicator is brought
in to assess the quality of the horses taking part. Stronger horses would be laden
down with weights to hamper their speed and make for a fairer race overall.
And it’s this sense of something that hampers or encumbers an ordinary activity
that we’ve retained in the language today.

The
word serendipity itself was coined by
the English author and historian Horace Walpole, in a
letter written to his friend (and distant cousin) Horace Mann on 28 January
1754. Mann had recently sent Walpole a much-prized portrait of Bianca Cappello,
a sixteenth century Italian noblewomen who had married into the Medici dynasty,
and while waiting for the picture to arrive Walpole had stumbled across the Cappello coat of arms in an old book. “This
discovery, indeed,” he wrote, “is almost of that kind which I call Serendipity.”

But
Walpole hadn’t just made the word up from thin air. Instead, he had taken it from “a silly fairy tale”
he had read called The Three Princes of
Serendip, whose title characters, he explained, “were always making discoveries, by
accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of.”

But neither had the fourteenth century writers of Walpole’s “silly
fairy tale” invented the name Serendip. In fact, it’s an old name for Sri Lanka, and probably comes from some ancient Sanskrit word meaning “dwelling-place of lions” (although there are several rival explanations).

For
that, we turn to the English writer William Boyd, who coined the fantastic antonym zemblanityin his 2001 novel Armadillo. Describing the practice of “making unhappy, unlucky and expected discoveries,” Boyd took the word zemblanityfrom the name of
Novaya Zemlya, a bleak and barren Arctic archipelago in the far north of Russia that was
once used as a Soviet nuclear testing site—in other words, about as far removed from a
tropical island as it’s possible to be.

27 February 2015

The
fact that there’s any kind of etymological connection between politics and
long-winded speeches (or, for that matter, between politics and a word meaning
“complete nonsense”) might come as little surprise. But the fact is thatbunkumowes its existence to a tediously
lengthy political speech delivered byUS Congressman Felix Walkerin 1820.

Born
in Virginia in 1753, Walker was elected to Congress in 1817 as representative
for Buncombe County, North Carolina. He spent a total of six years in the
House, during which time Congress was tasked with debating the so-called
Missouri Question—namely, whether the territory of Missouri should be admitted
into the Union as a free or a slave state—in late 1819.

The
debate rumbled on for several inconclusive months, until finally, just before
the decisive vote was due to be taken, Congressman Walker stood to address the
house on 25 February 1820.

He went on to deliver a lengthy, rambling, and largely irrelevant 5,000-word
speech—which, thanks to the wonders of the Internet, you can now torture
yourself withhere; to put that into perspective,
Walker’s speech is around 1,000 words longer than the entire role of
Hamlet.

Felix Walker, inventor of the cure for insomnia

Walker’s speech went on and on and on. And on. And on.
His exasperated colleagues repeatedly shouted him down and yelled at him to
desist, but, undeterred, he continued talking and proudly explained that he was
not, “speaking to the House, but to Buncombe.”

Out of everything that he said that day, it was this pithy
explanation that proved to be the most significant. Soon, saying or doing
something “for Buncombe” slipped into American slang to mean “doing something
purely to please other people”, and the mid-1800s, it was being so widely used
that its original spelling Buncombe was lost, and it was the
newly-simplified bunkum that ultimately became a byword for
political claptrap, empty promises, and eventually utter nonsense.

The clipped form bunk followed in the early
1900s, and we’ve been debunking things since 1923.

Felix Walker, meanwhile, is now commemorated on a plaque in his home county of
Buncombe for, quite rightly, giving a “new meaning to the word.”

26 February 2015

One
thing thatHaggardHawksdeals with quite a lot—all the time,
in fact—is trivia. Random bits of throwaway information. Miscellaneous facts.

Dissect
the wordtrivia under
an etymological microscope and you’ll find two fairly obvious Latin roots:tri-, taken from
the Latin for “three” (as in “triangle”), and -via, the Latin
word for “road” or “way” (as in “you can only get into town via the diversion
at the end of the high street that takes you two miles out your way”). So how
did a word that apparently means something like “three roads” come to imply
“random information”?

The
answer lies in the early Middle Ages with a little-known scholar namedMartianus Minneus Felix Capella, born in
Roman north Africa more than 1500 years ago. As well as having a name that
sounds like a magic spell, Capella was one of the first proponents of a
classical system of learning called the Seven Liberal Arts—seven fundamental
subjects he considered the cornerstones of a good education.

The pilot of Celebrity Squares was a complete failure

Capella’s work continued to be studied and discussed long after
his death, until eventually the idea of the Seven Liberal Arts had become a
well-established part of Western education. Although precisely what these
seven subjects were changed a bit over time, by the Early Modern period the
complete set was widely understood to be arithmetic, geometry, astronomy,
music, grammar, rhetoric and logic.

The first four of these—arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and
music—were considered the more worthwhile ‘mathematical sciences’, dealing
with concepts of quantity and magnitude, and so were set apart from the others
as a separate higher tier of learning known as the quadrivium, a
play on the Latin word for a crossroads. The remaining three—grammar,
rhetoric and logic—comprised a lower tier of learning, dealing purely with
matters of prose and language. And in contrast, it became known as the trivium, the
Latin word for a place where three (rather than four) roads meet.

Because this trivium was considered the less
important of the two, by the late nineteenth century its name—or rather, its
plural trivia—had come to be used of less important knowledge in
general, and eventually any random, throwaway facts or pieces of
information.

24 February 2015

It’s
been a long time coming, but here it finally is—the Haggard Hawks Blog.

With @HaggardHawks going
from strength to strength (and some exciting news coming on that front in the
next few weeks) the plan is to use this shiny new blog to share more detail and
more background on what we post on Twitter, as well as being able to field any
of your questions and queries more thoroughly than we can in 140 characters.
Feel free to comment, critique or query anything either here or back on
Twitter, and we’ll endeavour to answer as many questions as we can on the blog
in the weeks to come.

So
by means of a handselin, let’s start with the one question
we’re asked more often than any other—why “haggard” and why “hawks”?

Well, unsurprisingly it’s an etymology thing. Back when hawks were
used to hunt game rather than discuss word origins over the internet, a haggard hawk
was one that had been caught in the wild as an adult and then trained to hunt
for sport, as opposed to a tame bird that had been bred in captivity.

Just another day’s work at Haggard Hawks

The word haggard itself was borrowed into English
from French in the mid-1500s, and is probably ultimately descended from an old
Germanic word, hag, for a copse or woodland. So the
original “haggard hawk” was the faulcon hagarde of Old
French, literally the “falcon of the woods”. Sadly faulcon
hagarde sounds more like the hero of a romance novel than an
etymological Twitter account, so we went with Haggard Hawks.

But back to the birds. Because these captured wild birds would
always remain that little bit more unruly and unpredictable than their
captive-bred cousins, the word haggard eventually broadened to
come to describe anything (or anyone) with similar experience of the big bad
world, and ultimately anything that was slightly weather-beaten,
world-weary, and—well, haggard.

And that’s that. Now if only we could train hawks to make coffee
rather than hunt game, then we’d really be on to something.